Nanite debug

Chloe furiously taps at her tablet, trying to understand what the nanites were doing inside you to try to fix it. Normally you'd have been disturbed by the fact that someone else could control the machines linked to your brain so easily, but that thought vanished instantly once Chloe tapped a final time, and suddenly you had double-vision--you were seeing through two sets of eyes simultaneously.

It wasn't perfectly synchronized, however, and it was extremely disorienting. Your left-self turned to look at your right-self and vice versa. In your mind, you saw a weird super-position of two faces atop one another, one in the shape of Emily and one in the shape of Ela. You couldn't exactly tell which one was 'you', if one of them actually was. All you knew is that such a view started to make you feel extremely queasy.

"What's wrong now?" Zoe asked Chloe, looking at her tablet.

"The nanites aren't load-balancing properly. Only a subset are supposed to handle the link to the motivation and personality portions of the brain for both minds, but right now Emily's brain is doing the work for two because the rest of the nanites replicated that process across her whole brain. We have to assign this group here to a second group and alter the communication protocols."

You looked away from, essentially, yourself, and lay back, closing your eyes, both sets. "Could I do some sort of shapeshifter trick to help this?"

"Unfortunately, no," Chloe said as she tapped again. "Your brain could give signals to the other brain to **** shapeshifting or other abilities if I get this right, but right now you'd be telling your own mind to **** the other body to shapeshift and your brain can't comprehend it without some help. If this works, getting Ela to wrap around you would probably be the easiest way for you to cope with a lot of this."

More tapping, more headaches, but at least while you were lying still with your eyes closed it wasn't so bad.

Chloe sent another array of signals to the nanites, and things did feel different--very different. You opened two sets of eyes again, sitting up, but there was no illness associated with the dissonant images coming to your mind. That was weird, it was still like you could see two different angles of the same thing, particularly as you looked at Zoe and Chloe with both heads. You looked back at your two selves, recognizing you as, well, you and Ela as separate, but like she was extending from your mind. Her behavior and thoughts--you could feel her thoughts!--were slightly different from yours, but heavily influenced by you, you could just tell from poking around in her head a bit. You could mentally ask her 'favorite food?' and she'd respond with exactly what you'd love to eat. Favorite color, favorite music, and far beyond that, Ela's mind was essentially a redundant copy of your own, at least in 'human' ways.

"What's different about this time?" Ela asked, or you asked via Ela, you weren't really sure yet.

Chloe turned around the tablet so you could see the screen. Ela looked at the screen while you glanced at Zoe--processing two perspectives at once and it felt so natural. Chloe's change made it clear how that was possible: you read the code, something you didn't know you could do but you realized that was likely something they taught Ela, and quickly understood the algorithm. Your human brain was actually looping signals out to Ela's very unique neural clusters, which were used to processing parallel perspectives of the same thing. If you were computer hardware, your brain would be the CPU, a powerful way to compute ideas, but could only handle so much multitasking with data going in and out, while Ela would be the GPU, filled with tons of parallelism that could handle less complex operations many times over. Your human mind was doing all the critical thinking, and your elastomer mind was managing the raw data in parallel to take a significant burden off of your human brain.

The result was really unique--you could move Ela and yourself independently, and yet still feel like you were present in either body simultaneously. You stood up, while Ela stayed in bed, looking down at herself. "Wow, I could look really sexy in a body like this," you realized you were making Ela say while her hands roamed her form. You froze, focusing on both bodies to pause for a moment.

"I, uh..." your face turned a little red. "I think I need to figure out how to keep my inner thoughts a little more... inner."

Zoe smiled, and hugged around your human self. "It's fine. Because it's true, Ela, or really you, now have the potential to be as sexy as you wish. As exotic, as unusual, as bizarre, as... normal, too, if you really just want that."

You hugged back, both bodies smiling from the touch. With Ela's form, you reached out to hug Chloe as well, since she was nearby. "I still feel mostly like Emily, though. How does that work?"

Chloe set down the tablet, sitting on the side of the bed. It didn't really matter who they focused on to talk to, it felt like they were talking to your face. "Consider the fact that you're using about 80% of the nanites available to inject into you. It puts you at roughly 80% of 'you' in Ela, to the point where for the most part, there's very little distinction between the two. Especially when you are two humanoid people, you're almost indistinguishable mentally--like in this configuration, I'd consider you a singular person, you essentially are."

"The difference will be when you start to try more of Ela's abilities," Zoe said, letting go of your form. "Some will come very naturally to you, especially as you learn to shapeshift. Three-dimensional space, in particular, is probably fully within your realm of control and understanding. But the upper-dimensional behaviors and movements, senses and interpretations, that's going to probably remain Ela's domain almost fully. For now, that's probably a good thing--if you change your shape and something needs to happen in the amount of mass you use in this 3D area, having Ela's mind take care of the behind-the-scenes will keep you grounded. You could probably try to look at fifth-dimensional space how Ela might see it or how I might feel it, but it would probably make you extremely ill to comprehend as it stands since your mind can't really handle it, your senses and really your whole mind can't process information like that, not without lots of practice or training--or..."

"Let me guess: more nanites," you said with a frown.

"Right. Which, if we did that, all of Ela's abilities would be open and accessible and understandable to you, you could probably even fully leave this three-dimensional space if you want and return when you please." That was a strange, almost exciting thought. But it also frightened you immensely, since you didn't really understand what that might mean--given that you couldn't pierce the veil of upper-dimensional existence without Ela's help, it was hard to know the full extent of what those capabilities might mean, and what lay beyond the universe you knew.

"How exactly would Ela perceive things, anyway? Like, right now, I see through her body like a normal person." Your words shifted from your main body to Ela's as you continued. "But from here, I don't see anything unlike normal. If I had this 'upper dimensional sight' or whatever, what does that mean?" You rubbed your arms a little, looking down at your body. You actually wanted to get to know your new self better, but your curiosity overrode things first, you needed to know if you should just take the plunge with all the nanites or leave things as-is.

"Alright, I guess we're going to start a lesson early today. For the record, Ela just 'knows' by her nature how to behave in these upper dimensions, so we hadn't tried teaching her the function of this yet. When you start accessing her knowledge, you'll see just what she knows and can comprehend, but absent some of her knowledge I'll start from the beginning." Chloe stepped to a whiteboard, drawing a few figures. "As explained in 19th century literature, and then explained better by sci-fi comedy cartoons a century later, pretend this whiteboard is a universe of two dimensions. All beings here see each other as flat lines, with different lengths and such if a being like this triangle traverses around this square, to observe its shape. To understand the shape is a square, the triangle has to make a full loop around the square to observe how it's length changes from one unit to square root of two units, and how many times the triangle-being sees this size oscillation. That's a lot of work to observe the characteristics of a square, but we as three-dimensional beings can look down from our perspective, and instantly see the square's shape. So, comprehending 2D space in 3D can give us a very different understanding of the space. Same would be true for adding more dimensions onto or 3D space, except you see very different topologies."

Zoe picked up the marker, and made a new shape inside the square--a circle. "Like Chloe said, the triangle is observing the square. It can only see the outside perimeter of the square--this circle I drew, the 'guts' of the square if you will, aren't understandable by our triangular friend unless the square's shape was somehow broken or opened, to view the circle inside. But from above, we can see the circle clearly, no square-surgery required."

You gulped. "Are you saying... Ela can just see everyone's guts all the time?"

"Well... yes and no. There might be physical constraints in the upper dimensions that we're not aware of that limit perspectives, and if we were to take the whiteboard off the wall, we could angle it in such a way that we would be looking at the 2D plane almost the same way these 2D beings would, and that's how you can even perceive reality through her body, since she's aligned this part of herself just right into our 3D plane. Shifting perspectives to whatever else is possible lets her see some unusual things--and yes, it might allow her to see inside things, or other behaviors we can't comprehend."

"Okay, last little factoid, and then I think we need to go have a meal," Chloe said. You nodded both heads... you were doubly hungry, and could use some food. "In this flat space, pretend a 3D object can pass through the plane. Like, a sphere. This triangle being would see a circle appear out of nowhere, it would grow in size and mass, and then it would shrink again and disappear. It would see 'slices' of the 3D object, infinitely thin of course because there's no depth in this 2D space. So, what we might be looking at at any time with Ela is just a 'slice' of her. But imagine that sphere was made out of her elastomer--it could press itself pretty flat, which changes how much of it is present in the 2D plane. She's still got depth, though, she can't squish infinitely thin. The only other option would be if one of these 2D shapes intersected this flat space, so the 2D triangle would see a line--with strange details of course, seeing a 2D slice in a 2D plane gives a glimpse at what upper-dimension stuff might look like. Ela is probably pretty 'flat' in terms of her physical being and being able to exist in 3D space, but still has some upper-dimensional existence to her. She could make parts of herself seem detached and appear to float in midair, for example, but in truth everything would still be connected, she'd just be bound by other physical constraints. She could also probably grab things and pull them out of our three dimensions as we are aware of them, and put them in another 3D domain."

This was a lot of information to take in, especially if you took more nanites and didn't just let Ela's mind handle the upper-dimensional stuff. The things Zoe and Chloe were describing to you sounded essentially like magic. You wondered what the modern equivalent of witches burning at the stake would be if you did all this stuff in front of others. If you had Ela's body make shapes appear and disappear at will in public? If you could describe the contents of someone's breakfast because you could see inside their stomach from an upper-dimensional perspective? Gross, that sounded gross, you decided not to do that. But also... physical barriers didn't really mean much in that case. You could seemingly pass through a wall by just exiting and re-entering the third dimension, that seemed interesting. In lewder capacities, you could touch people--even enter people's bodies--to stimulate them or toy with them in ways they were not prepared to comprehend.

You had to think about this, whether you were happy figuring things out how they were now, or if you wanted that total control over Ela, to become her completely with the last load of nanites. You could think about it over lunch.